


Who Are You, Billy Coen?

by TatteredTeddy



Category: Biohazard | Resident Evil (Gameverse)
Genre: F/M, Local Girl Hates Military, So Does Her Traumatized Boyfriend
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-13
Updated: 2021-01-13
Packaged: 2021-03-18 01:55:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,300
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28735317
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TatteredTeddy/pseuds/TatteredTeddy
Summary: Billy Coen left Raccoon City a couple of months before the outbreak. Kali Ryman wants to know why... and why he was there in the first place.
Relationships: Billy Coen/Original Female Character(s)





	Who Are You, Billy Coen?

“I want to know more about the history of Billy Coen.”  
  
Upon hearing his name, Billy quirks an eyebrow up at his girlfriend. “Oh, yeah? What do you want to know?”  
  
“You said you were in Raccoon City and you left only a couple months before the outbreak… I remember hearing about some strange things happening in the months before I left, is that why you left earlier?”  
  
“I guess you could say that.”  
  
Kali tips the teapot she’s holding downwards, and a dark golden stream of liquid pours into her mug. Steam floats up from the surface of her tea as she wraps her hands around the mug to absorb its warmth and joins Billy on the couch. “You’re very mysterious. I like that about you… it makes me curious.”  
  
“Yeah, I get that a lot. People judge like crazy though.” Billy leans back and his eyes fixate on the ceiling. He knows that Kali grew up in a bubble, protected by her parents and her older brother and every program for gifted students that she was shoved into to keep her away from the average masses that she was taught to think of herself as superior to. But she seemed to know that he was vastly different from her, and she wanted to understand him every chance she got. Their differences sparked a curiosity in her that he couldn't resist indulging, what with that pink-lipped smile and those perfectly round cheeks and her big brown eyes that absolutely light up with joy every time he speaks. He wanted to take her into the dark side, so to speak, that side of life where people were happy and free and not treated as a lab rat or a freak of nature like she was before she left her childhood home and met him.  
  
“You sure you won’t judge?”  
  
A genuine smile lights up Kali’s face, that same smile that roped Billy in every time. “I promise I won’t judge.”  
  
“Well, I wasn’t exactly a citizen of Raccoon City… more like I got stuck there for a night and saw the worst of what the place had to offer.”  
  
“Hm?” Kali tilts her head to the side, her curious eyes widening. “What do you mean?”  
  
“Well, you see… I was in prison for a little while. They were gonna transfer me and the bus to the new place was headed through the Arklays when some of those zombie dogs attacked it. I got out fine, but some weird shit went down when I made a run for it.” Of course, some of the more shocking details were left out. But he wasn’t sure he wanted to revisit a certain part of his past quite yet.  
  
“You were in prison?” Kali’s not quite sure how to react to such a revelation. Of course, she promised not to judge him, and she wouldn’t go back on that promise for anything. But the sheltered lifestyle she’d lived before she and Kevin escaped Raccoon City had never exposed her to anything like that. Prisons were simply the things of television dramas in her mind. She’d never spoken to anyone who’d actually been in one, or even inside one in the simplest sense of the word. “I… I’m so sorry, I had no idea.”  
  
“There’s nothing to be sorry for. Of course you didn’t know, I never mentioned it. It was all one big goddamn cover-up, anyway. I took the fall for something I didn’t even do.”  
  
A cover-up? So he hadn’t done anything to deserve prison time at all? She sets her mug down on the coffee table, fully prepared to listen to anything he had to tell her. “What sort of cover-up?”  
  
“Well… it was about a year ago, when I was out on a mission with the Marines. Our team leader ordered us to attack an innocent village in the middle of goddamn nowhere, just because we couldn’t come back all sad and empty-handed after most of our team died in combat. My team pinned the whole operation on me, because I was the only one who had the balls to tell them what they were doing was wrong. I told them off and they retaliated by pinning the whole job on me when we came back.” Even as he only bothered to recall the most barebones details of the story to her, Billy could remember all of it as vividly as if it had happened just yesterday. “Orders don’t justify killing people who didn’t do anything to you… no matter who those orders came from.”  
  
Kali’s breath catches in her throat. She had no idea any of this happened. She knows he’d never brought it up on his own before, and he likely wouldn’t have if she hadn’t asked, but she still feels like she should have sensed something so heavy had been weighing down on him all along. Her hand comes to rest on top of his, gently tracing her fingertips over the very edges of his tattoo that snake around the back of his wrist. “I… oh, oh my gosh, sweetie…” she says softly. “I… I had no idea. That… that you were dealing with something like that, I mean…”  
  
“You said you wouldn’t judge…”  
  
She squeezes his hand tightly, her smaller hand wrapping around his the most that it could reach. “I’m not judging you at all. I just… I’m so sorry that happened to you. You didn’t deserve any of it. They’re horrible, you know that? The whole military institution.”  
  
Billy lets out a deep sigh. “I sure know that now. My father would be pissed beyond belief if he knew I thought that.”  
  
“Well, I understand you. You didn’t deserve to be treated like that. You were the only strong one… because you were the only one who tried to stand up to them.” She leans over against him and rests her head on his shoulder. He’s so warm… so warm and gentle and kind underneath and exterior that would give off such a different impression. She knew deep inside, from the moment he mentioned having been in prison, that he never could have done anything so wrong. Something had to have been deeply corrupt in the system. “You didn’t deserve anything that happened to you, sweetie. You’re too good for any of those guys in the Marines… you always were.”  
  
“I’m just glad you think a prisoner is good enough for you.”  
  
“You’re not a prisoner. You never really were. Even if you’ve been in prison… you don’t need to give yourself that title.You know you did nothing wrong, the people who were the real killers know you did nothing wrong… and it’s true. There’s nothing you could have done that would have prevented your old teammates from showing their true colors.”  
  
“If you say so. I still think about it a lot. I dunno… I bet I’d still be in the Marines right now if that never happened. But I never would have met you… or Rebecca. She saved my life.”  
  
“Rebecca? Who’s that?” Kali’s tone is genuinely curious, without a hint of jealousy. Most other girls might jump to conclusions, but someone must have done something for him in between the zombie dog attack and him arriving at his new home. She doesn’t mind if it was a girl who did that for him, she’s just glad it was someone.  
  
“Rebecca Chambers. Little S.T.A.R.S rookie… kinda reminds me of you, y’know. Same mannerisms and stuff. She was supposed to hunt me down and arrest me, but then some fuckin’ zombies came at us and we ended up having to cooperate. After all that went down, she filed a false report about my death and took my dog tags back to the S.T.A.R.S guys to prove it.”  
  
“So… do the authorities think you’re dead now?”  
  
“Pfft, all the police reports and all that shit on me got destroyed when Raccoon City got blown up. I’ve tried it, no one knows where the hell I was for the past couple years of my life.”  
  
“Wel, that’s a good thing. I’m just glad you’re officially recognized as alive. I’m glad you’re alive in general, you know.”  
  
“Heh… thanks, babe.” Billy leans down and gently kisses the top of Kali’s head. “I’m just relieved that I survived that shit. I’m not sure how two people on their own could’ve fought all those things, but I guess the two of us had more than enough experience to take them on.”  
  
“Well, now I want to know what you two did! Tell me more about how you fought all those zombies!”  
  
“You just want me to brag about how your boyfriend’s such a bad boy, don’t you?” Billy laughs.  
  
“Maybe I do! So what?”  
  
“I like that about you, dollface.” He wraps his arm around Kali’s shoulders, pulling her down into his lap and eliciting a surprised giggle from her. “Alright, now that we’re both in a comfortable position… let’s get started on our little zombie-killing adventure.  
  
So… it all started on this train that had just stopped in the tracks in the middle of the mountains. Everyone in the place had either been eaten or had turned into zombies themselves. Rebecca gave me a bit of a hard time at first, trying to arrest me and all that, but she came around when I saved her life. There were these creepy giant zombie-leeches that would just crawl all over you like some kind of hive mind, and they all started climbing on her like crazy. So after we cleared out some of the zombies on the train, it started moving out of nowhere and we had to try and stop it. There wasn’t even a conductor or anything in there, it was like the place was possessed.”  
  
Kali nods her head enthusiastically. “Mhm~! So did you stop it?”  
  
“Well, we did what we could, but it still crashed. And get this… it took us straight into some creepy Umbrella facility.”  
  
“Umbrella… I feel like everyone expected me to be some genius scientist working for them someday.” Of course, it was never the real Kali that people saw when they told her that. The real Kali wanted to help people by interacting with them face-to-face, not just holed up in a lab all day. And even though her career path had to be put on pause when she left Raccoon City, she hoped she could at least be helping Billy by letting him open up to her. She loves him, after all. And not even that sort of fake love that the rest of the perfect, so-called “gifted” people of this world gave out on a stack of conditions. She would never just love him “despite” his past. She would always love him along with everything he came with, every piece of baggage she had to help him carry.  
  
“Love you too, dollface. What’re you mumbling on about though?”  
  
“Wha— huh? I was speaking out loud?”  
  
“Yeah, you were.”  
  
“Oh… I was just thinking about you. And… this advice someone gave me once. That you shouldn’t settle for someone who likes you despite your flaws or your past, but along with them. And I hope you know I love you along with everything the Marines put you through.”  
  
Billy is taken aback for a second, processing what Kali has just told him. He’d never heard of that before… maybe because no one had ever given him so much of a chance to love him along with everything, not just in spite of it. “I… I love you along with everything too. Now come here.” He pulls her into a tight embrace, burying his face into her fluffy hair and planting a kiss on her soft, round jawline. “You get distracted by thinking a lot, don’t you?”  
  
“Mhm. Mostly thinking about you.” Kali snuggles up closer to Billy, trying to get in on all of his warmth. He’s so cute when he gets all goofy and lighthearted… what an absolutely lovely human being he is, the complete opposite of all those horrible things people had tried to convince him that he was. “Keep telling me about the Umbrella place! Did you see any creepy experiments?”  
  
“Oh, yeah. A whole bunch of them. There were some weird mutated animals, and this giant thing called something-Tyrant or whatever… and then there was Marcus. Marcus was one hell of a tough fight.”  
  
“Marcus…? That sounds like such a normal human name. What did he do?”  
  
“Well, he was one of the guys who created Umbrella. But he wasn’t some old guy, he looked kinda young. I guess what happened was the other Umbrella founders got ticked off and had a couple of their goons kill him, but he used the virus or the leeches or… something… to bring himself back, and I guess that was the day he wanted to get revenge on Umbrella.”  
“What? That’s crazy!” Kali’s eyes glitter with intrigue, just waiting to see how this story ends. Did Billy take him down once and for all and save the world from some undead guy with a thirst for vengeance? “So let me get this straight… he was killed by some Umbrella guys but he reincarnated through the virus they made, and then he came back to fight Umbrella… even though he was the one who created Umbrella in the first place?”  
  
“Exactly. So you wanna hear about how I kicked his ass to kingdom come?”  
  
Kali giggles sigh unrestrained excitement, her voice just as high-pitched and cheerful as a child, or just someone who hadn’t seen everything she had. “Of course I do. I always want to know more about you.”


End file.
